Brian Cook Presents

While I work with websites every day as a job, the CookBlog is a labor of love. My 8-5 is a constant struggle to raise the organic search rankings of my employer’s sites. The CookBlog is a place for me to hone my CSS skills, keep a journal and hopefully write articles that appeal to other folks. I am, however, an SEO (search engine optimizer) by profession, so it’s only natural for me to optimize the CookBlog for search engines. What search do I want to show up for? My name, of course!

Brian Cook.

Unfortunately, my name is common, which makes it harder to achieve a good position. Even worse, there’s an NBA player currently on the books of the Los Angeles Lakers whose name is… you guessed it: Brian Cook.

That means I have to compete against his NBA.com page, his own personal page, his Yahoo, Wikipedia and ESPN pages, and a whole host of other pages on major sites that reference him as Brian Cook. All of those will have more natural links than my site, from more authoritative sites than anyone who would link to me. So you’ll forgive me if I pity myself just a little bit.

Alright, I’m done. And I’m proud to report that despite the obstacles of having a famous NBA player, a professional filmmaker and an engineering company that share the name of Brian Cook, the CookBlog is in the top ten search results when you type “Brian Cook” into Google. Now that’s an achievement I can be proud of.

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